On Unix-like operating systems, the uptime command tells you how long the system has been running.

This page covers the Linux version of uptime.

Description

uptime gives a one-line display of the following information:

  • Description

  • Syntax

  • Files

  • Examples

  • Related commands

  • Linux commands help

  • The current time.

  • How long the system has been running.

  • How many users are currently logged on.

  • The system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

The uptime information is the same information contained in the header line displayed by w.

System load averages is the average number of processes that are either in a runnable or uninterruptible state. A process in a runnable state is either using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU. A process in uninterruptible state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for disk. The averages are taken over the three time intervals. Load averages are not normalized for the number of CPUs, so a load average of “1” means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time.

Syntax

uptime [options]

Options

Files

Examples

uptime

Displays system uptime information. Output resembles the following:

08:11:22 up 146 days, 34 min, 3 users, load average: 0.28, 0.45, 0.38

The following is a breakdown of what the above output means.

ps — Report the status of a process or processes.top — Display a sortable, continually-updated list of processes.w — Show who is logged on and what they are doing.